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    The Bell Jar: A Novel
    The Bell Jar: A Novel
    The Bell Jar: A Novel
    Ebook292 pages4 hours

    The Bell Jar: A Novel

    By Beverly Barton

    4/5

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    • Mental Health

    • Identity

    • Self-Discovery

    • Friendship

    • Poetry

    • Fish Out of Water

    • Mentor Figure

    • Search for Identity

    • Bell Jar

    • Love Triangle

    • Forbidden Love

    • Inner Demons

    • Mentor

    • Power of Friendship

    • Chosen One

    • Coming of Age

    • Social Expectations

    • Family Relationships

    • Relationships

    • Literature

    About this ebook

    One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels

    “A coming-of-age masterpiece. . . . Sylvia Plath has become one of the influential writers of her time.” —Boston Globe

    Sylvia Plath’s masterwork—an acclaimed and enduring novel about a young woman falling into the grip of mental illness and societal pressures

    Esther Greenwood is bright, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath brilliantly draws the reader into Esther’s breakdown with such intensity that her neurosis becomes palpably real, even rational—as accessible an experience as going to the movies. A deep penetration into the darkest and most harrowing corners of the human psyche, The Bell Jar is an extraordinary accomplishment and a haunting American classic.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateAug 11, 2015
    ISBN9780062444479
    The Bell Jar: A Novel
    Author

    Beverly Barton

    Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts. Her books include the poetry collections The Colossus, Crossing the Water, Winter Trees, Ariel, and Collected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize. A complete and uncut facsimile edition of Ariel was published in 2004 with her original selection and arrangement of poems. She was married to the poet Ted Hughes, with whom she had a daughter, Frieda, and a son, Nicholas. She died in London in 1963.

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    Reviews for The Bell Jar

    4/5

    501 ratings254 reviews

    What our readers think

    Readers find this title to be a well-written and thought-out book. It offers excellent imagery and a beautifully tragic story that explores the mind of a depressed teen. Some readers found the main character relatable and comforting, while others found her motivations confusing. The book touches on important themes but lacks psychological analysis. Despite some criticisms, many readers enjoyed the book and recommend it. Overall, it is a must-read for those interested in exploring mental illness and the struggles of a troubled life.

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Excellent book. "'If you love her," I said, "you'll love somebody else someday.'"
    • 5/5
      It was extremely haunting. I had to put the book down several times from the intensity of several of the parts of the book, before I eventually came back to it, which made this book take longer to read than usual. It was a very good book though, so well written and real, I could almost feel the insanity that was gripping escher greenwood while I was reading it, which made the tangibility all the more captivating, and at times intolerable.
    • 2/5
      Esther's descent in a nervous breakdown. She's self-absorbed and doesn't express herself. I didn't find it sad as I believe some do.
    • 4/5
      A nail biting tail of a young lady with everything to gain slowly slipping into madness. Ms.Plath knows exactly how madness takes over and describes it perfectly.
    • 4/5
      Deeply depressing.Esther Greenwood is talented and successful. She has decent looks and is in New York on a big fat scholarship. She has her whole life ahead of her. But things go downhill very quickly for Esther. Things get so bad to the point that her doctor recommends shock therapy which traumatizes the poor girl and since her spiraling even further downhill. During her steady decline she tries to commit suicide and is consequently thrown into a mental institution. And that's when things get really serious... or crazy rather This book dives into the deepest pits of our psyche. It chronicles the dark descent into psychosis. And as the main character is also the narrator we get an inside look at what's going on inside her head. It is almost maddening in itself to read the pages of this book. And it is heartbreaking to watch such a strong successful woman go down so quickly in flames. Very reminiscent of Girl, Interrupted... Or should I say Girl, Interrupted is very reminiscent of The Bell Jar since the latter was written first? The Bell Jar definitely takes place in a decade way before Girl, Interrupted did. However they ended in very much the same way.I devoured this book in one sitting but then again it's not a very large book. This was my first Sylvia Plath book and I have to say I'm glad I gave it a chance. It seems to me that people who have read this book either love it or hate it. To be honest I kind of feel indifferent about it. I didn't adore the book but I didn't loathe it either. Perhaps this is one of those classics that everybody should read once because it acts as a time capsule as well as a look into mental illness and psychosis, both of which it is written beautifully for. With that in mind I would definitely recommend reading this book at least once to take a look into are human past and what may be even more scary, I look into our own human minds.
    • 4/5
      I read The Bell Jar on the recommendation of a friend who also warned me that it would be best to read it when I was in a cheery mood. She was right about that part in this one was fairly depressing. I read it over the summer while I could surround myself with sun and everything comfortable that I love. The story itself is very much based on Plath's own personal experiences and struggles with depression (and the insane 'therapy' that she was treated with). I found myself relating to her in so many ways with her descriptions of what depression feels like, having suffered from bouts of it myself. She really had a way of putting the feelings into words, and it's devastating that we lost a brilliant writer in her.
    • 5/5
      great, simply great
    • 5/5
      Wonderful read. Read it through in one sitting-- skipped sleep simply because I could NOT put this book down.
    • 5/5
      I read this book when I was in my early 20's and could not relate. Now, 45 years later I feel her intensely. I found some humor that rivaled the dark humor of Holden Caulfield. She easily could be the female version of Holden, with less money. Sad and heartbreaking. Mental illness 60's style. If she had been a baby boomer she may have had a chance then again, maybe not.
    • 4/5
      The story of Ester Greenwood is the story of a young girl trying to find her place in life. She wins a scholarship to work at a fashion magazine in New York and strives to live the perfect life with perfect friends, perfect career aspirations, perfect looks, and a I want it all now mentality. But running alongside her desires is the slow onslaught of mental illness, and her sinking into hopelessness and despair. The more she descends the more the bell jar encases and surrounds her sapping her strength to break free. This is quite a harrowing story make all the more real by the matter of fact unhurried story telling...."Wrapping my coat around me like my own sweet shadow, I unscrewed the bottle of pills and started taking them swiftly, between gulps of water, one by one. At first nothing happened but as I approached the bottom of the bottle, red and blue lights began to flash before my eyes. The bottle slid from my fingers and I lay down."........"I had locked myself in the bathroom, and run a tub full of warm water and taken out a Gillette blade".....The challenges of life the perception of people the need to be happy and successful all pale into insignificance when the body and mind shuts down as senses are overwhelmed. Plath's writing explores the attitudes of society towards those who suffer from mental illness and describes in some barbaric detail the use of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) which is still used today as a means to relieve the symptoms of mental health...."I tried to smile but my skin had gone stiff, like parchment. Doctor Gordon was fitting two metal plates on either side of my head. He buckled them into place with a strap that dented my forehead, and gave me a wire to bite"......The Glass Jar appears semi bioographical and to me is an attempt in part by the author to come to terms with her own mental issues. It is sad to note that one month after publication in the UK Sylvia Plath herself committed suicide by sticking her head in an oven in her London flat. It cannot help but make me wonder was the writing of The Glass Jar a cry for help and if so was it too little too late. The general tone and feeling of nihilism that prevails this book is best summed up in the following quote....."why I couldn't sleep and why I couldn't read and why I couldn't eat and why everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end"......The Bell Jar is as powerful today as when it was first published and demands to be read if only to understand the human condition and to realize that mental health and the inevitable fallout is still very present in our everyday lives.
    • 4/5
      I have put off reading this book for years. The descriptions, comments and reviews I had seen, while almost universally positive, made me feel that I wouldn't like the book. And in some respects, I was correct: for the first third of the book, I wasn't interested. Esther's life in New York was of a kind that I could imagine but didn't have much interest in and her interior monologues convinced me that she was a person I could not readily relate to. However, in the second half of the book, I found Esther more understandable (though never totally so). And though to my more modern sensibilities, it was upsetting that the doctors didn't try any drug therapies before electro-shock was applied, my intellect knows that this was common in that era. One thing Plath did extremely well was convey how Esther might find suicide a reasonable alternative to life committed to an asylum.
    • 4/5
      A finely chiselled portrait of a depressed woman descending into madness. By the end of the story we are keenly involved in her plight, and are rooting for her to get out of the hospital and see what kind of life she can assemble.
    • 3/5
      Feel a lot like this character at times. I particularity liked the description of being in the middle of a tornado and watching things go on around you, but you are not really taking part.
    • 4/5
      Wow.... What a profoundly beautiful and haunting book. The prose, emotions, and imagery are out of this world; it's truly a groundbreaking rally cry for mental health and feminism. I'm disappointed that it took me this long in my life to get around to reading such a classic, but I do get a sick sort of satisfaction that I'm reading this book at pretty much the same age as Plath was when she committed suicide. I'm sad she never saw this book published, although the notoriety of her suicide I'm sure helped propel this book even further since "The Bell Jar" dealt with depression and suicide. I feel like this book is a right of passage for young women. It's like "Catcher in the Rye." This book captured depression so completely and realistically, that it is honestly is making me a little depressed right now. "The Bell Jar" centers on a 19 year old college girl who seemingly has it all; she's in New York after having won a fantastic magazine award with twelve other young ladies and even though she has nothing bringing her down, she can't even bear to be complacent. Her depression grows more enveloping until her only solution is to try to get rid of it completely, by killing herself. Wow. A heavy, depressing, important read.
    • 5/5
      The writing in this book was beautiful. It is based on Sylvia Plath's real experiences (and altered slightly for the book); it was a very eye opening view of mental health in the 60s.

      Be Wary of Some Spoilers

      The first half is really relatable for young women/people who are struggling to decide what they want to do, or where they are headed. The Fig Tree was a beautiful metaphor for that stage in life. I want to print it out and hang it in my room.

      The second half was more focused on her illness (it is never really specified as to what it is; possibly depression or bipolar disorder, some have suggested there was possibly some psychosis). It was rather dark and disturbing in some parts, particularly during the electroshock therapy. Plath does a very good job of making you feel some of the fears and anxiety she experiences during these parts.

      I love this book.
      10/10
    • 4/5
      Great look into depression from a first person point of view that is so easy to relate to as a young adult.
    • 4/5
      I finally got around to reading this book, and I am so glad I did. It's like a step back into the world of the 1950s. The author writes from a perspective few of us will ever have, and although it is painful to read at times, I feel as if I have a greater insight into true mental illness than I ever had before. Too bad Ms. Plath did not live to write more books.
    • 3/5
      Interesting, somewhat dismal and gloomy. Ominous. I enjoyed the relationships Esther made with the other characters in the book and her somewhat realist, sarcastic views of her life experiences.
    • 5/5
      I meant to write a review on this book ages ago but I could never find the words to express how emotional and magnificent this book is. Plath may have been a tortured soul but she knew how to take those feelings and put them onto paper in a marvelous way. Her lyrical writing entrances the reader and makes them incapable of putting the book down. I was struck by how many personal feelings went into this book and can only say that the emotions expressed in this are among the most sad but relatable in society then and currently.
    • 3/5
      When I was in high school and reading Glamour and Mademoiselle, each August they had issues with college women as editors -- sort of the precursor of the internship, but these women got to wear the latest styles and be photographed as well as running copy and getting coffee. Sylvia Plath had been one of these "college girls" a few years earlier -- I've always wished I could see the issue she worked on, I think it was Mademoiselle. I believe some of that experience is described in The Bell Jar, and it's a fairly autobiographical novel in other ways. Not only the story of a young woman growing into a poet, it's also a look at the experience of educated American women in the 1950s. Instructive reading for those of us who came along later.
    • 5/5
      I feel like this is a somewhat underrated book. I know a lot of people read it, especially teenage girls, but still I feel like few really appreciate it or get it. I think it's a book which young women can easily identify with. I've never found a book which so accurately describes what depression and the questioning of self feels like as The Bell Jar does. It's very insightful into that state of mind, it's not something that's easy to describe to other people which is probably why it's often misunderstood. There's no angst or moping in the character of Esther, and her depression is seemingly well hidden and unobtrusive, which makes her breakdown so stark. I liked this about her character, she's intelligent and has depth and I think this is what makes her character so easy for me to identify with. Depression is not just about feeling sad or angsty but as I've experienced it, it does feel like being in a bell jar. I've read it multiple times and always garner something new from it. It's a shame that Sylvia didn't write more prose, as her writing in The Bell Jar is excellent and you can see glimpses of her poetry at times. The ending always makes me feel strong and calm, there's something about it which stays with me for a long time after I've finished reading.
    • 5/5
      This is, in fact, an excellent novel. I went into it with an open mind and wasn't disappointed. The way Sylvia Plath writes is resonant, vivid and haunting. She really gets her hooks into you and you can hear her telling you the story as you read it. I mourn the fact that this is her only novel. Although this is a book about madness and the blackness of depression, oddly enough I didn't find that it was overly depressing. You don't need to have spent time in the bell jar to connect with the protagonist and take a deep interest in her story. The fact that the novel is semi-autobiographical makes it even more compelling. Sylvia Plath was (is) the real deal, a very real and scintillating talent, and despite it's associations with tiresome emo culture and the "cult of Sylvia Plath", The Bell Jar really is worth reading.
    • 5/5
      Plath's bell jar is first and foremost a beautifully written novel. The novelist saw herself as a poet first and her prose reads much like poetry. The basic theme of the novel, that modern society is destructive to women and ultimately seeks to destroy them through sexuality (see Cather's My Antonia) or depression (see Yellow Wallpaper) make this a premier work of Feminist fiction.
    • 4/5
      For the 1 or 2 people who don't already know, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is about one woman's struggle with mental illness. At the beginning of the book, the main character, Esther, has just received a prestige award. She gains a month long internship at a New York magazine along with 11 other girls. The girls are taken out to dinners, parties, lunches and given all sorts of gifts but Esther is rather blase about the entire thing.When she comes home her mother immediately lets her know that she has not been accepted to a prestigious writing course that she'd had her heart set on. Esther decided to spend her summer writing a novel but gets discouraged by the belief that she hasn't had enough life experience to write well. This coupled with the memories of what she feels was a betrayal by her unofficial fiance Buddy helps to send Esther into a downward spiral of depression and insomnia.Her mother convinces her to see a psychiatrist whom Esther immediately dislikes and who preforms electro-shock therapy incorrectly on her. Eventually, Esther is sent to a private facility where she meets a new doctor and receives treatment for her depression.While the book has a reputation for being very popular with the angry feminist set but I didn't see it like that. I saw it as just a disturbing voyage through the mind of a woman who is losing hers. Yes, Esther struggles with what is appropriate for her as a woman in that time period. However, I just saw someone who is unsure what her place in the world, who she is and what she is supposed to do. I think that is a feeling that is easily relatable to so many people, both men and women. I do totally see why this book is so popular with the young adult women though since I had many of the same thoughts when I younger.Though I've never personally dealt with serious mental illness, I have suffered through bouts of postpartum depression after the birth of each of my children. I felt like I'd lost control over my own impulses, thoughts and feelings and it was the scariest thing I've ever dealt with. This book brought back some of those feelings for me and I didn't like that at all. I can't say I enjoyed the book as it wasn't exactly a fun read but I am glad that I read it and would recommend it to anyone.
    • 5/5
      This is a fantastic journey. The buildup, collapse, and recovery of a strong woman.
    • 5/5
      Quite brilliant. The Bell Jar is aptly named; in the first two thirds of the book Plath captures perfectly the sense of suffocation and stodginess that comes of the disconnection Esther finds in depression. Within this isolation Plath renders her thought processes and logic so clear that her reactions can, at times, seem almost normal, such is the extent to which we are permitted to enter into the psyche of an ill mind. Then, in the last third of the story, one really does feel the lightening sensation of recovery, the coming up for air if you will. Truly a must read, Plath portrays her era from a fascinating perspective.
    • 4/5
      I have just finished this book by Sylvia Plath a talented author and poet and have to say I really enjoyed it. Although the content was quite harrowing to follow, A young girl in the throws of a nervous breakdown. Her thoughts on her boyfriend who she has just learned cheated on her and her role in everyday life, which she feels is not so rosy. A young girl who just can't cope with the changes in her life.It did remind me a bit of Catcher in the Rye at the start, a young person trying to come to terms with growing up in 50s America.I felt that I was drawn along with her journey downwards into her isolation and suicidal thoughts and feelings. When she is hospitalised and given shock therapy. Drawn also, as she starts to come out of the blackness and back to normality.The notes at the end of the book show that she went on to be married and have children, but it seems she was never really free of the feelings of isolation and it is sad to hear that she did eventually take her own life. So sad that so many gifted and talented people suffer from some form of mental instability.Not a light read certainly but a worthwhile one definitely!
    • 3/5
      Part autobiographical, this novel follows the life and madness of Esther Greenwood. A smart and attractive woman, she finds herself questioning her abilities and talents. After a failed suicide attempt, Esther is taken to a hospital, where she undergoes shock therapy treatments.I'm not sure how I feel about this book. It was beautifully written, but I had a hard time connecting with Esther. She just didn't seem real, rather she came across as a dream, as a wisp of a person.
    • 5/5
      I've read The Bell Jar 2-3 times ... it's been awhile, so it may be time for a reread. Sylvia Plath was a gifted author - she managed to write a story about a girl's path towards an attempted suicide (based on her own) that is not at all depressing or melodramatic, and sometimes even funny. Or maybe that's just my own weird sense of humor, I don't know. At any rate, this is a must-read book, especially for girls :)
    • 4/5
      surprisingly enough i found this suicidal novel rather comforting. simply and beautifully written it leaves you with a feeling of gratitude to have permitted a quiet and private glimpse to the intricate mind of Sylvia under her bell jar...

    Book preview

    The Bell Jar - Beverly Barton

    An image shows the front page of a book titled “The Bell Jar: A Novel” authored by Sylvia Plath.

    The Bell Jar

    Sylvia Plath

    a novel

    Foreword by Frances McCullough

    P.S. Biographical Note by Lois Ames

    Drawings by Sylvia Plath

    A black-and-white sketch shows the legs of a woman in stiletto shoes.An image shows the words “Olive Editions” written along the circumference of an oval with a white circle in it.

    Dedication

    for Elizabeth and David

    Contents

    Cover

    Title page

    Dedication

    Foreword

    Chapter 1

    Chapter 2

    Chapter 3

    Chapter 4

    Chapter 5

    Chapter 6

    Chapter 7

    Chapter 8

    Chapter 9

    Chapter 10

    Chapter 11

    Chapter 12

    Chapter 13

    Chapter 14

    Chapter 15

    Chapter 16

    Chapter 17

    Chapter 18

    Chapter 19

    Chapter 20

    P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

    About the Author

    Read (and listen) On

    Also by Sylvia Plath

    Back Ad

    Copyright

    About the Publisher

    Foreword

    by Frances McCullough

    You might think that classics like The Bell Jar are immediately recognized the moment they reach a publisher’s office. But publishing history is rife with stories about classic novels that barely squeaked into print, from Nightwood to A Confederacy of Dunces, and The Bell Jar is one of them. It’s hard to say whether, if Sylvia Plath had lived—she’d be a senior citizen on her sixty-fifth birthday, October 27th, 1997—the novel would ever have been published in this country. Certainly it would not have been published until her mother died, which would have kept it from our shores until the early ’90s. And by that time, Plath might have become a major novelist who might see her first book in a quite different light.

    But of course Plath did die a tragic death at the age of thirty, and the book’s subsequent history has everything to do with that fact. The first time her manuscript came into the offices at Harper and Row in late 1962 it was under the auspices of the Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship, a grant affiliated with the publishing house that supported the writing of the book. The grant required Plath to submit the final manuscript to the Saxton committee. Two Harper editors, both older women with a special interest in poetry, read the novel in hopes of getting first crack at a new voice in the literary world—but both of them found it disappointing, juvenile and overwrought. In effect, they rejected the book, though it hadn’t been offered to them officially, and in fact Plath was quite insistent that it shouldn’t be published in America because its roman-à-clef elements would be so hurtful to her family and their friends.

    Actually, Plath already had an American publisher. Knopf had bought her first book of poems, The Colossus (1962), an event that triggered the first outpouring of prose that became The Bell Jar. For a long time Plath had been thinking about writing a novel; her ambitions to break into the slicks, especially the Ladies Home Journal, were constantly on the back burner as she concentrated on her poems. Addressing her as Dear Mrs. Hughes, the Saxton Fellowship had turned down her poetry manuscript, the one that became The Colossus, so it must have been a particular point of pride when they later accepted The Bell Jar project.

    She also had a British publisher: William Heinemann Limited had published The Colossus in the fall of 1960, and agreed to publish The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas (though everyone in literary London knew Plath was the author), in January 1963—which turned out to be just a few weeks before Plath’s death. Reviews were lukewarm, and Plath was deeply stung by them. But she had already begun another novel the previous spring, and by her mother’s account, there was yet another finished one that went up in a bonfire one day when Plath was in a rage. Although she wasn’t as surefooted in her fiction as she was in poetry, she planned to write novel after novel once her book of poems (Ariel) was finished.

    But by the time The Bell Jar came out in London, Plath was in extremis; her marriage to poet Ted Hughes was over, she was in a panic about money, and had moved to a bare flat in London with her two small children in the coldest British winter in a hundred years. All three of them had the flu, there was no phone, and there was no help with child care. She was well aware of the brilliance of the poems she was writing—and in fact A. Alvarez, the leading critic of the day, had told her they deserved a Pulitzer. But even that knowledge didn’t save her from the dreaded bell jar experience, the sudden descent into deep depression that had triggered her first suicide attempt in the summer described in the novel. A number of the same elements were in place this time: the abrupt departure of the central male figure in her life, critical rejection (Plath had not been accepted for Frank O’Connor’s writing class at Harvard that Bell Jar summer), isolation in new surroundings, complete exhaustion.

    Plath’s suicide on February 11, 1963 brought her instant fame in England, where she had made occasional appearances on the BBC and was beginning to be known through her publications. But she was still not well known here in her native land, and there was no sign that she would become not only the last of the major poets read widely, but also a feminist heroine whose single published novel had spoken directly to the hearts of more than one generation.

    When I first arrived at Harper in the summer of 1964, there was no actual job for me—I’d been reading for the Saxton Prize novel contest, the latest incarnation of the Fellowship, on a temporary basis, and I’d been put on staff simply because, as my new boss put it, If you’re as good as we think you are, you’ll figure out something to do. I looked around; the poetry editor, who was one of the readers of The Bell Jar who hadn’t liked it, was retiring. I did a little checking and discovered that virtually every poet in America was unhappy with his or her publisher. This seemed to me a good opportunity to attract some stars to our list, so I proposed hiring a poetry scout—my candidate was Donald Hall. I sent off a memo to Cass Canfield, the publisher, who thought this was a fine idea.

    When Don went to London later that year, Ariel had just been published and Don was elated; he bought a copy of the book and sent a cable urging us to publish it. Knopf was of course interested too, but they’d quickly hit a sticking point. None of their poets—and they had a fine list—had ever been paid over $250 as an advance against royalties for a book of poems, and it was unthinkably unfair, they felt, to make an exception for Plath. Meantime, Don pointed out to Plath’s husband and executor Ted Hughes that it would make perfect sense to publish Ariel with Harper since Hughes himself was published there, so the nod was going in our direction.

    I knew about Plath; her odd name had been ringing in my head ever since I’d first heard it from A. Alvarez, who’d been teaching at Brandeis in my graduate school days. But these poems profoundly affected me as none of her New Yorker poems or Colossus poems had. Although there was opposition inside the house from some quarters, who felt the poems were too sensational, eventually Roger Klein, a young editor, and I were allowed to buy the book for $750—a small sum, noted editor in chief Evan Thomas—to give the young people their head.

    From the moment Ariel appeared in print, it was a sensation, with a double-page spread in Time magazine setting off a frenzy. Women were joining consciousness-raising groups, and Plath was often the center of the discussion. After her death, Ted Hughes, who inherited the copyright on all her work, published and unpublished, had assured her mother that The Bell Jar would not be published in America during Mrs. Plath’s lifetime. But the demand for more Plath had led to bootleg copies of the novel coming in from England; at least two bookstores in New York carried the book and sold it briskly.

    There was yet another quirk in the publishing history of The Bell Jar, a copyright snag. Because it had been published abroad originally by an American citizen, and had not been published in America within six months of foreign publication or registered for copyright in the United States, it fell under a provision (since nullified) called Ad Interim, which meant it was no longer eligible for copyright protection in America. This had been a closely guarded secret, but one day in 1970 I had a phone call from Juris Jurjevics, an old friend at another publishing house, alerting me that John Simon at Random House was aware of the copyright situation and was planning to publish the book. This was horrifying; I called Simon and explained to him that the only reason the book hadn’t been published was out of respect for Mrs. Plath’s feelings, that we had an agreement to publish it if she changed her mind or if she died, and that it was unconscionable for him to steal this book. To my utter astonishment, he agreed, and said he would cancel the publication.

    Obviously we had to publish the novel immediately. I called Ted Hughes and his sister Olwyn, who was the literary agent for the Estate, and we undertook the delicate business of telling Mrs. Plath—who later told her side of the story in Letters Home (1975), a selection of Sylvia’s letters to her.

    But again there was internal opposition to the project, from the remaining original reader of The Bell Jar, who didn’t like it any better the second time around. Despite the success of Ariel, the house was concerned about publishing posthumous work that wasn’t up to snuff. I turned to Frank Scioscia, a brilliant Harper sales manager with a legendary book nose, and asked if he could read the novel overnight and give me a reaction the next day. He did; Frank loved the book and thought it would have extraordinary sales. That saved the book for Harper, and nearly three million paperback copies have been sold since 1972.

    The eight-year wait between the novel’s original publication in England and its American appearance had only increased its audience. Plath was nearly a household name by 1971, there were Plath groupies, and the women’s movement was in full bloom, with recent books from Germaine Greer and Robin Morgan. Confessional literature was in vogue. And there was a new fascination with death; Elisabeth Kübler-Ross had burst on the scene and Erich Segal’s tearjerker, Love Story, seemed to have a permanent place on the bestseller list. Depression and mental illness were subjects much on people’s minds as well; they were reading R. D. Laing. A. Alvarez, the critic who so admired Plath, had written a highly romantic book about suicide featuring Plath as Exhibit A. A timely excerpt from the British edition appeared in the New American Review around the time of publication and became the topic of the moment.

    The Bell Jar sailed right onto the bestseller list and despite some complaining reviews, it quickly established itself as a female rite-of-passage novel, a twin to Catcher in the Rye—a comparison first noted by one of the original British reviewers. In fact The Bell Jar was published on the twentieth anniversary of Salinger’s classic and Sylvia Plath herself was just two years older than the fictional hero, Holden Caulfield.

    To Molly O’Neill, a seventeen-year-old lifeguard in Ohio who would grow up to become a food writer for the New York Times and a novelist herself, reading The Bell Jar that summer was nothing short of astonishing. Above all she was amazed by the possibility of madness descending like a tornado into a typical bright young woman’s life out of nowhere—That could happen? I could hardly believe it. To Janet Malcolm, the New Yorker writer who became fascinated by how we know what we know about Plath, The Bell Jar is a fine evocation of what madness is actually like.

    Although her illness was never actually diagnosed, several researchers in the field have noted Plath’s unerring description of schizophrenic perception: a hallway becomes a menacing tunnel, a person approaching has an enormity that threatens to engulf the viewer the closer they come, objects loom out of all proportion, the alphabet letters on a page become impossible to decipher, and virtually everything seems both unreal and dangerous. Despite the interventions of the last quarter-century, from Librium to Prozac, Plath’s vivid, entirely rational, almost steely description of that world remains true and uneclipsed by any later writer. Now that it’s become socially acceptable to talk about such things, it’s easy to forget that reading The Bell Jar brought us an understanding of the experience that made such openness possible.

    And what about the novel’s larger relevance to today’s young reader? At a time when Holden Caulfield’s sensitivities seem unrelated to the hard edges of today’s world for many readers, does The Bell Jar still have any meaning? After all, the novel was pre-drugs, pre-Pill, pre-Women’s Studies. In the survivalist mode of the ’90s, suicide may seem like a loser’s option. But the adolescent suicide rate has quadrupled since World War II, and if suicide isn’t quite as romantic as it was when The Bell Jar was first published here, statistics indicate that it’s definitely on the rise. Depression has become almost epidemic in America in the meantime.

    When I asked an informal focus group of bright young women in their twenties what they thought about the book, they were unanimous: they loved it. Although some of them found it depressing, others found it surprisingly undepressing. The issues, they pointed out, haven’t changed; yes, the social elements of teas and dating and the accepted conventions have changed, but they’re not unfamiliar, since they’re the stuff of old movies. The big questions: how to sort out your life, how to work out what you want, how to deal with men and sex, how to be true to yourself and how to figure out what that means—those things are the same today.

    For contemporary readers who look back on the fifties as simply being cool, it may be difficult to see how daring Plath really was. In the clutches of postwar conformity and rampant conservatism, even enjoying one’s own body was an incredibly risky thing to do. Plath had another rein to wear: because she was poor, everything depended on keeping her scholarship and winning prizes. If she was less than perfect, she could lose it all in a moment. For anyone going through the college admissions process today, Plath’s anxieties are all too familiar.

    Perhaps because she died young, Plath has almost always been viewed by critics as a contemporary. I remember one prominent feminist critic who aspired to be her biographer saying, about Plath’s difficult last year of marriage: I don’t get it—why didn’t she just walk out? as though that would be an obvious option for a young American woman stranded in the British countryside with two small children and no funds in the very early sixties.

    But it may be equally true that readers feel she’s a contemporary because her voice has such intensity, such a direct edge to it. Almost everything Plath wrote in her short life—and it was extraordinary how much she did write, exhausting three typewriters and writing everything from poetry to plays to radio dramas to fiction—has that quality, the immediacy of a letter just opened. It’s heartbreaking to think of what she would have written, what wisdom and maturity would have brought to this stunning voice.

    There are also things we can see from this distance that we couldn’t see before. When the novel was first published, her death was still a fresh tragedy, leaving her family in a huge amount of pain that any new Plath publication only intensified. For readers, the posthumous publications were of course seen as messages from the grave, clues to the mystery of what really happened. The jacket of the first edition, with its dried-blood color and lugubrious tone, certainly gave no hint of the hilarity inside. In fact, this is a very funny book—the intervening twenty-five years give us a good reason to delight in Plath’s amazing humor, a quality she herself thought would make her career as a novelist.

    Even such a powerful personal legend as Plath’s recedes in the enduring presence of the work itself, which is of course as it should be. After Janet Malcolm’s penetrating piece on the Plath legend appeared in the New Yorker in 1994, the artist Pat Stier, one of the many readers to respond, noted The poetry soars over everything. This novel too has wings—it takes its readers where they need to go, and shows no sign of losing altitude.

    Frances McCullough

    New York, 1996

    1

    It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. I’m stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that’s all there was to read about in the papers—goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.

    I thought it must be the worst thing in the world.

    New York was bad enough. By nine in the morning the fake, country-wet freshness that somehow seeped in overnight evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream. Mirage-gray at the bottom of their granite canyons, the hot streets wavered in the sun, the car tops sizzled and glittered, and the dry, cindery dust blew into my eyes and down my throat.

    I kept hearing about the Rosenbergs over the radio and at the office till I couldn’t get them out of my mind. It was like the first time I saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward, the cadaver’s head—or what there was left of it—floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast and behind the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadaver’s head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar.

    (I knew something was wrong with me that summer, because all I could think about was the Rosenbergs and how stupid I’d been to buy all those uncomfortable, expensive clothes, hanging limp as fish in my closet, and how all the little successes I’d totted up so happily at college fizzled to nothing outside the slick marble and plate-glass fronts along Madison Avenue.)

    I was supposed to be having the time of my life.

    I was supposed to be the envy of thousands of other college girls just like me all over America who wanted nothing more than to be tripping about in those same size-seven patent leather shoes I’d bought in Bloomingdale’s one lunch hour with a black patent leather belt and black patent leather pocketbook to match. And when my picture came out in the magazine the twelve of us were working on—drinking martinis in a skimpy, imitation silver-lamé bodice stuck on to a big, fat cloud of white tulle, on some Starlight Roof, in the company of several anonymous young men with all-American bone structures hired or loaned for the occasion—everybody would think I must be having a real whirl.

    Look what can happen in this country, they’d say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can’t afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car.

    Only I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. (I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.)

    There were twelve of us at the hotel.

    We had all won a fashion magazine contest, by writing essays and stories and poems and fashion blurbs, and as prizes they gave us jobs in New York for a month, expenses paid, and piles and piles of free bonuses, like ballet tickets and passes to fashion shows and hair stylings at a famous expensive salon and chances to meet successful people in the field of our desire and advice about what to do with our particular complexions.

    I still have the makeup kit they gave me, fitted out for a person with brown eyes and brown hair: an oblong of brown mascara with a tiny brush, and a round basin of blue eyeshadow just big enough to dab the tip of your finger in, and three lipsticks ranging from red to pink, all cased in the same little gilt box with a mirror on one side. I also have a white plastic sunglasses case with colored shells and sequins and a green plastic starfish sewed onto it.

    I realized we kept piling up these presents because it was as good as free advertising for the firms involved, but I couldn’t be cynical. I got such a kick out of all those free gifts showering on to us. For a long time afterward I hid them away, but later, when I was all right again, I brought them out, and I still have them around the house. I use the lipsticks now and then, and last week I cut the plastic starfish off the sunglasses case for the baby to play with.

    So there were twelve of us at the hotel, in the same wing on the

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